


Turret Joy

by katsumeragi



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:22:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsumeragi/pseuds/katsumeragi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Turret Wife is so pleased with her turret family, and will inspect every bump in the night to protect it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turret Joy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silver_Queen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silver_Queen/gifts), [Lady Anne Boleyn (Silver_Queen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silver_Queen/gifts).



The test chamber was getting cold, and her husband was coming home soon. 

Everything was a scattered mess and it was almost all Junior Turret’s fault. Radios, cubes, prisms, and coffee cups were flung around in every direction, so Turret Wife scattered to push them all into piles or obsessive stacks. Junior Turret nudged some of the prism stacks apart from each other to “play monster” and rampage through the city, just to cause another mess for her to clean. And, oh dear, she hear his metal footsteps in the hallway, which were growing to be as loud as pillars smashing intruders. From around the corner, the tall, stout, animal-printed machine that was her robotic spouse poked out.

King Animal Turret made a low, rumbling beep akin to the jaguar print he was painted. It evoked some kind of reaction from her when he made those mechanical growls, but she wasn’t sure what to call them. For now, she just computed them as “positive.” It was the same reaction every time she thought about the lovely family she had with her lovely husband and child (although turrets can’t actually bear children, Aperture once released a half-size Desk Turret collection that was quickly recalled because of a 457% increase in cubicle-related spontaneous combustion. The few left unpackaged in the lab were “adopted” by turrets with overactive emotion sensors.)

Junior Turret knocked down another stack of prism cubes. Turret Wife fired a warning laser towards her son and he quickly began to push the blocks away. 

Ah yes, the perfect turret family unit.

\---

Something was banging around in the vents.

Her husband, although all turrets had a good sense of hearing, was a heavy sleeper. To be honest, she couldn’t even understand how she heard the scrapes against metal considering they were being made by someone who was doing their best to not be heard. She hopped to the vents, still a bit wobbly from just booting up out of sleep mode.

In the intricate language that was beeps, whirrs, and broken English, this point was known as “when the vines came through.” The outside world’s turmoil and overgrowth grew into Aperture once GLaDOS was indisposed of. It didn’t add much of a distraction to the life of a turret (well, save for the occasional trip over a plant while hobbling down old test chambers, and as one could imagine, turrets can’t exactly roll back up. They’re like mechanical tortoises.) How in all of this mess could there still be test subjects alive? Were any organic matter test subjects living off the poisonous plants and substance-less grass growing in the test facility now? No, evolution wasn’t that hasty. Was it?

Turret Wife knew there were many hidden rooms in the Aperture test facility, but didn’t expect they would be in the ventilation system (she thought, didn’t humans breath what came out of there? Why would one live in there to soil the air supply? Actually, that was ingenious, she mused.) The scratching continued out of the test chamber area and into the vast openness of back rooms, offices, and moving walls. Turret Wife hopped from catwalk to catwalk, suction airways to flat ground, and avoided being smashed by the moving walls. 

Speaking of which, she thought….who would be moving those walls at this point? Did someone reboot the security units, or…her? 

It was a fleeting thought in her wires, as she was going to become a turret pancake if she dwelled on it for too long. The light sounds of movement had stopped and lead her to a room of offices and cubicles covered in vines and roots. Before rounding a corner she saw a hunched shadow stayed behind the corner while adjusting her lens to see what the intruder was. 

It was…that girl. The one who at one point was the only test subject alive, and the object of GLaDOS’ malicious desires. She looked as disheveled and exhausted as Turret Wife had remembered seeing her years, perhaps even centuries ago. Her orange test subject-issued jumpsuit’s top hung around her waist, exposing cuts and bruises on her forearms. Her long fall boots were cast aside, showing blisters, callouses, and sores put upon her. Someone that needs to escape so often would have to wear those boots constantly, Turret Wife figured. She wondered if this was all normal stress on her body by now.

Zooming into the girls face, Turret Wife couldn’t identify the emotion on her face. All turrets were programmed with emotion identifications, but they were only the basics. Happy, sad, angry, and sleep mode were really the only important ones that a basic system needed. The girl’s face looked like a combination of sad and sleep mode as she was fixated on something ahead. It was a piece of organic matter attached to piece of cardboard. Was there some emotional significance to this Idaho-based organic matter? Was there something in her memory core that was tied to the potato? How could a potato make her so sleep mode-sad?

Turret Wife remembered one point when Junior Turret once lost a radio that was left behind the walls of their test chamber. He wouldn’t stop producing a very shrill, high octave beep that filled almost the entire facility. She wanted to do anything to stop his turret sadness, from finding him extra power supplies so he would be at his best to collecting an army of coffee cups to please him. She just wanted the noise to stop. She wondered if the girl’s voice box would emit such a sound if she stared at the potato long enough. She had to do something to prevent it. 

At that point Turret Wife booted up her vocal controls, the ones mostly used as a homing device for turrets, or a calming way for them to power down to sleep mode. She played a soft, light sound, similar to what an opera would sound like. Through her lens she could see the girl’s ears perk up and she reached for her boots in the corner, but slowly creeped to the corner, without her boots on. It was wiping the sleep-sad off of her face and left…the expression of something that could not compute? Well, it matched whatever she was feeling at the moment. Perhaps, Turret Wife thought, the girl thought she was a defective turret for not attacking the human and simply singing. Little did she know the great sacrifice she was making for the turret community by taking preventative measures. The girl seemed to process the situation and resumed her place staring at the cardboard potato exhibit. She closed her eyes and seemed to drift into sleep mode with a smile on her face.

Turret Wife couldn’t understand why she was having such a positive reaction in her wiring. It was greater than the thought of how happy her family unit made her, but like that of how she and King Animal Turret met in the testing facility (there was once a test subject as hard as the girl that would constantly try to escape the testing facility, and she was stationed next to King Animal Turret as the final stand against him. Because of their teamwork and the strategy she leant to him to shoot at the prism cubes to cause a hallway of reflected beams, they shot him down, and formed a great bond that day as more than colleagues.) The words she remembered hearing from GLaDOS that described how she felt about testing chambers and new machinery might match this electric feeling she had. Estatic? It sounded a lot like electric and would describe a lot, but there was one that didn’t relate to her hardware that might have been more appropriate. 

Joy.


End file.
